Crossrail will eat money. Kill it, Boris, and save the bankrupt Tube instead
Simon Jenkins
28.04.09
Kill Crossrail. Kill it now. Offer it up as London's gift to public sector sanity, while there is still time to avoid millions of pounds climbing into billions on a project that London does not need. What London needs is a fully working, modernised Tube. So kill Crossrail to save the Tube.
Crossrail, with a completely new rail tunnel from Paddington to Liverpool Street, has few friends. It has been stopped and restarted too many times to count over the past quarter-century. When Gordon Brown said in 2007 that "it will definitely proceed", sceptics sensed the cold hand of death grip its throat.
When Whitehall set out a tripartite funding package for the line in 2008, the caveats and qualifications grew in number. In an interview in February the transport minister, Lord Adonis, warned the world that, if Londoners do not raise their two-thirds share, "the Mayor understands that Crossrail will collapse ... ".
Mention Crossrail to Boris Johnson and his normally open, cheerful visage changes to that of a parent just told his kids are on drugs. He starts to shake. When reminded that he once said Crossrail was "one of those times you have to say, get in that hole and keep digging" the look becomes a rictus.
At a farewell dinner at City Hall earlier this month, the outgoing head of Transport for London, Tim O'Toole, hinted at his known private view that Crossrail is capital madness. He pleaded with his colleagues to fight instead for the existing Tube, now teetering on the brink of insolvency. TfL executives know that continuing with Crossrail will eat money and distract management for a decade.
It would yield nothing but bad news stories, while severely disrupting traffic in central London just when it will be recovering from the water mains chaos. Test drilling is already upheaving St Giles.
Crossrail is no longer a railway that makes sense. Back in the Eighties it was way behind the Jubilee line and the then (and now) top priority, a new northeast/southwest line from Hackney to Chelsea and beyond. Lines were needed to fill the Tube-less no-man's-lands of Greenwich and Chelsea/Fulham.
It took Margaret Thatcher to force through the Jubilee line to help the Reichman brothers build Canary Wharf. Chelsea/Hackney has no such power backers.
This project's only real friends have been in the City, eager to fend off the "threat" from Docklands and garner the bulk of the 900,000 extra office jobs predicted for London a decade ago. Nobody expects that need now. The Central line's parallel capacity can easily be increased by station improvements and better management.
Crossrail's backers have duly fallen back on that catch-all for any extravagant project, "urban regeneration". But that involves taking the line far out to the east, at further cost. For all the efforts of consultants to prove otherwise, this line is neither profitable nor a priority for economic renewal.
Boris Johnson now has a golden chance. He knows the capital must tighten its belt somehow - especially after he failed to curb the gargantuan appetite of the Olympics (costing more than half the £16billion total for Crossrail).
Johnson has already had to end his predecessor's costly fantasies, the Thames Gateway bridge, the Cross-river tram and the Dagenham light railway extension.
The Government has offered £5.6billion to the Crossrail budget. The rest must come from a raised London business rate (£3.5billion), borrowing against so-called train access charges (£2.3billion) and £2.7billion from TfL, this time borrowing against future fares.
Given the recent history of Tube finances, these figures are wholly unreal. TfL is close to technical bankruptcy. Borrowing against future revenue is mad, especially when it has already been assigned to meet Crossrail's running costs. Has London learned nothing about dodgy accounting from the past five years of such projects?
Meanwhile the City Corporation is offering a meagre £200million, on top of which is budgeted £150million from City businesses and, once upon a time, £230million from the airports authority, BAA. Lord Adonis claims this amounts to a further £750million, which is inconceivable. The truth is that Crossrail is another financial pig in a poke.
The Government has already poured £2billion in extra guilt money into the Tube to finance its public-private partnership (PPP), the sunk cost of this now largely aborted scheme. No minister or official has ever taken responsibility for it - indeed the official, Shriti Vadera, has been rewarded with both a peerage and a ministry.
In addition, the Government has pledged a huge £39billion to TfL over the next decade, a sum higher than anything conceived during nationalisation. This, it says, will have to embrace the completion of the PPP scheme and Crossrail. But the latter is not formally ring-fenced.
This is the Mayor's great opportunity. He has a £1.4billion hole in his transport budget already and must somehow fund £3billion of debt left over from the Treasury's collapsed Metronet infrastructure company.
Adonis said last November that there was no way he would plug this hole, despite it being one of the Government's own creation. He could hardly have given a more direct indication of his willingness to see Crossrail crash.
Johnson could now argue that the £5.6billion for Crossrail be switched to other Tube projects, such as resignalling the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines and replacing Metropolitan line stock, projects that may anyway have to be postponed to meet the cost of Crossrail. Cancelling the latter would relieve the Tube budget of a tidal wave of uncertain costs now advancing down the track.
This would enable Johnson to declare himself the saviour of London's Underground railway, after a decade of mismanagement and financial chaos.
By liberating himself from Crossrail and demanding that London be allowed to keep its transport grant, he could begin to reconstruct TfL's finances and meet its voracious appetite for new signals, stations and rolling stock. He could declare a clean slate.
Johnson need not fear the Government on this: if ministers wanted Crossrail they would have paid for it. He need not fear the City.
He can use the recession as an excuse to put this white elephant to sleep while garnering the popularity of restoring London's transport system to sanity. But first he must kill Crossrail.
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